I took the elevator up to the hospitality suite on the twentieth floor, where a variety of young, larva-pale publicists in variations on black stretch pants, black bodysuits, and black boots sat on couches and smoked.
“I’m Cannie Shapiro from the Philadelphia Examiner,” I said, to the one sitting beneath a life-size cardboard cutout of Maxi Ryder in battle fatigues, brandishing an Uzi.
Larva Girl paged languidly through some pages full of names.
“I don’t see you,” she said.
Great. “Is Roberto here?”
“He stepped out for a minute,” she said, flip-flopping one hand toward the door.
“Did he say when he’d be back?”
She shrugged, apparently having exhausted her vocabulary.
I peered at the pages, trying to read upside-down. There was my name: Candace Shapiro. And there was a thick black line through it. “NGH” read the note in the margin.
Just then Roberto hustled in.
“Cannie,” he said, “what are you doing here?”
“You tell me,” I said, trying for a smile. “Last I heard I was interviewing Maxi Ryder.”
“Oh, God,” he said. “Nobody called you?”
“About what?”
“Maxi decided to, um, scale way back on the print interviews. She’s only doing the Times. And USA Today.”
“Well, nobody told me.” I shrugged. “I’m here. Betsy’s expecting a story.”
“Cannie, I’m so sorry…”
Don’t be sorry, you idiot, I was thinking. Do something!
“… but there’s nothing I can do.”
I gave him my best smile. My most charming smile, which I hoped was underscored with my I-work-for-a-large-important-newspaper steel. “Roberto,” I said, “I was planning to talk to her. We saved the space. We’re counting on the story. Nobody called me… and I schlepped all the way up here on a Saturday, which is my day off…”
Roberto started wringing his hands.
“… and I would really, really appreciate it if we could maybe just get even fifteen minutes with her.”
Now Roberto was wringing his hands and biting his lip at the same time, plus shifting from foot to foot. Bad signs all.
“Listen,” I said softly, leaning toward him, “I watched every single one of her movies, even the direct-to-video ones. I’m, like, the complete Maxi expert. Isn’t there anything we can do?” I saw him start to waver, when the cell phone on his belt shrilled.
“April?” he said. April, he mouthed to me. Roberto was a sweetheart, but not the sharpest knife in the drawer.
“Can I talk to her?” I whispered, but Roberto was already rehol-stering his phone.
“She said they weren’t comfortable with your, um, compliance.”
“What? Roberto, I agreed to every single one of her conditions”
My voice was rising. The larval creatures on the couch were starting to look vaguely alarmed. As was Roberto, who was edging out into the hallway.
“Let me talk to April,” I pleaded, holding out my hand for his cell phone. Roberto shook his head. “Roberto,” I said, hearing my voice breaking, imagining Gabby’s gloating grin when I came back to the office empty-handed. “I can’t go back without a story!”
“Look, Cannie, I am so, so sorry…”
He was wavering. I saw he was. And that’s when a tiny woman in high-heeled calf-length black leather boots came trip-trapping down the long marble hall. There was a cell phone in one hand, a walkie-talkie in the other, and a no-nonsense look on her unlined, carefully made-up face. She could have been a very mature twenty-eight or forty-five with a great plastic surgeon. This, undoubtedly, was April.
She took me in— my zit, my anger, my black dress and sandals from last summer, far less fashionable than anything any one of the couch larvae were wearing, in one cool, dismissive glance. Then she turned to Roberto.
“Is there a problem?” she said.
“This is Candace,” he said, pointing weakly at me. “From the
Examiner.”
She stared at me. I felt— actually felt— my zit expanding beneath her gaze.
“Is there a problem?” she repeated.
“There wasn’t until a few minutes ago,” I said, struggling to keep my voice calm. “I had an interview scheduled for two o’clock. Roberto tells me it’s been cancelled.”
“That’s right,” she said pleasantly. “We decided to limit our print interviews to major newspapers.”
“The Examiner has a circulation of 700,000 on Sundays, which is when we’d planned the story for,” I said. “We’re the fourth-largest city on the East Coast. And nobody bothered to tell me the interview was off.”
“That was Roberto’s responsibility,” she said, raking him with her gaze.
This was clearly news to Roberto, but he wasn’t going to contradict Miss Kitten with a Whip. “Sorry,” he muttered to me.
“I appreciate the apologies,” I said, “but as I told Roberto, we’ve now got a hole in our Sunday newspaper, and I’ve wasted my day off.” Which wasn’t technically true. Stories fell through all the time, as April probably knew, and we’d just pop something else in the hole. And as for wasting my day off, any time I got a free ticket to New York, I always found something to do there.
But I was furious. The nerve of these people, to treat me so rudely, and to be so patently, completely not sorry about it!
“Isn’t there any way she can see me for a few minutes? Since I’m here?”
April’s tone was becoming decidedly less pleasant. “She’s running late as it is, and she’s flying right back to location this afternoon. To Australia,” she emphasized, as if this was a place a country mouse such as myself had most likely never heard of. “And,” she continued, snapping a small notebook open, “we’ve already scheduled a telephone interview with your boss.”
My boss? It was inconceivable that Betsy would do this, beyond inconceivable that she’d do this and not tell me.
“With Gabby Gardiner,” April concluded.
I was stunned. “Gabby’s not my boss!”
“I’m sorry,” April said, sounding not sorry at all, “but those are the arrangements we’ve made.”
I backed into the hospitality suite and plopped into a chair by the window. “Look,” I said. “I’m here, and I’m sure you’d agree that it would be better for all of us to do an in-person interview— even a quick one— with someone who’s seen all of Maxi’s movies, who took the time to prepare for this— than something over the phone. I’m happy to wait.”
April stood in the hall for a moment. “Do I have to call security?” she finally asked.
“I don’t see why,” I said. “I’ll just sit here until Ms. Ryder finishes up with whoever she’s in with, and if it happens that she’s got a minute or two to spare before she has to go rushing back to Australia, I will conduct the interview that I was promised.” I clenched my hands into fists so she wouldn’t see how I was shaking, and played my final card. “Of course, if it should turn out that Ms. Ryder doesn’t have a few minutes for me,” I said sweetly, “then I’ll be writing a thirty-inch story about what’s happened to me here. And by the way, what’s your last name?”
April glared at me. Roberto sidled closer to her, flicking his eyes back and forth between us, as if we were playing a very fast game of tennis. I stared right back at April.
“It’s impossible,” she said.
“Interesting last name,” I said. “Is it one of those Ellis Island specials?”
“I’m sorry,” she said, for what would be the last time, “but Ms. Ryder’s not going to be speaking to you. You were sarcastic to me on the phone…”
“Ooh, a sarcastic reporter! Bet you’ve never seen one of those before!”
“… and Ms. Ryder doesn’t need your kind of attention…”
“Which is fine,” I exploded, “but couldn’t one of your lackeys or flunkies or interns have had the courtesy to call me before I came all the way up here?”
“Roberto was supposed to,” she said again.
“Well, he didn’t,” I told her, and crossed my arms. Standoff. She stood and glared at me for a minute. I glared right back. Roberto leaned against the wall, actually shaking. The larvae stood in a row, their eyes darting back and forth.
“Call security,” April finally said, and turned on her heel. She looked back over her shoulder at me. “You,” she said. “Write whatever you want. We don’t care.”
And with that, they were gone: Roberto, shooting me a final, desperately apologetic look over his shoulder, the larvae, all in black boots, and April, and whatever chance I had of meeting Maxi Ryder. I sat there, until they’d all piled into an elevator. Only then did I let myself cry.
Generally speaking, hotel lobby bathrooms are great places to have breakdowns. People registered at the hotel are mostly using the bathrooms in their rooms. People on the streets don’t always know that they can breeze right in to the lobby of even the fanciest hotel and almost always use the toilet unmolested. And the bathrooms tend to be spacious and fancy, with all the amenities from hairspray and tampons to actual towels for wiping your tears and drying your hands. Sometimes there’s even a couch to collapse on.
I staggered down the hall, into the elevator, and through the gold door reading “Ladies” in elaborate script, heading for the handicapped stall and peace, quiet, and solitude, grabbing two neatly rolled towels on my way in. “Fucking Maxi Ryder!” I hissed, and slammed the door, sat down, and pressed my fists against my eyes.
“Huh?” said a familiar voice from somewhere over my head. “Why?”
I looked up. A face was peeking over the top of the stall.
“Why?” Maxi Ryder said again. She was just as adorable in person as she was on the big screen, with her saucer-wide blue eyes, her lightly freckled, creamy skin, her cascade of auburn curls, seemingly brighter and more glossy than standard-issue human hair was meant to be. She was gripping a slim cigarette in one tiny blue-veined hand, and as I watched she took a generous drag and blew it out toward the ceiling.
“Don’t smoke in here,” I told her. It was the first thing I could think of. “You’ll set off the alarms.”
“You’re cursing me because I’m smoking?”
“No. I’m cursing you because you stood me up.”
“What?”
Two sneaker-clad feet plunked lightly onto the marble and came to rest outside my stall. “Open up,” she said, rapping at the door. “I want some explanation.”
I slumped down on the toilet seat. First April, now this! Reluctantly I leaned forward and unlocked the door. Maxi stood outside the stall, arms crossed on her chest, waiting for her answers. “I’m from the Philadelphia Examiner,” I began. “I was supposed to interview you. Your little Gestapo-ette told me, after I came all the way up here, that the interview had been canceled and rescheduled with this woman at my office who’s just…” I gulped. “Vomitous,” I arrived at. “So it kind of ruined my day. Not to mention our Sunday section.” I sighed. “But it’s not your fault, I guess. So I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have cursed at you.”
“Bloody April,” said Maxi. “She never even told me.”
“I’m not surprised.”
“I’m hiding,” said Maxi Ryder, and gave a nervous giggle. “From April, actually.”
In person her voice was soft, cultured. She was wearing bell-bottomed jeans and a scoop-necked pink T-shirt. Her hair was piled into the kind of artless updo that probably took a hairdresser half an hour to construct, ornamented with tiny, sparkling butterfly clips. Like most young female stars I’d met, she was thin to the point of unreality. I could make out the bones of her wrists and forearms, the pale blue tracery of veins along her neck.
Her pouty lips were painted scarlet. Her eyes were carefully lined and shadowed. And her cheeks were streaked with tears.
“Sorry about your interview,” she said.
“It wasn’t your fault,” I said again. “So what brings you to these parts? Don’t you have your own bathroom somewhere else?” I asked.
“Oh,” she said, and drew a long, shuddering breath. “You know.”
“Well, actually, not being a thin, rich, successful movie star, I probably don’t.”
One corner of her mouth quirked upward, then drew down again into a trembling crimson bow. “Ever had your heart broken?” she asked in a shaky voice.
“Actually, yes,” I said.
She closed her eyes. Impossibly long lashes rested against her pale freckled cheeks, and tears slid out from beneath them.
“It’s unbearable,” she said. “I know how that sounds…”
“No. No. I know what you mean. I know that it feels like that.”
I handed her one of the rolled-up towels I’d grabbed on the way in. She took it, then looked at me. It was, I thought, a test.
“My house is full of things he gave me,” I began, and she nodded vigorously, curls bouncing.
“That’s it,” she said, “that’s right.”
“And it hurts to look at them, and it hurts to put them away.”
Maxi slumped to the bathroom floor and leaned her cheek against the cool marble wall. After a moment’s hesitation, I joined her, struck by the absurdity of it all, and how it would make a great opening for an article: Maxi Ryder, one of the most acclaimed young actresses of her generation, is crying on the bathroom floor.
“My mother always says that it’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all,” I said.
“Do you believe that?” she asked.
I only had to think about it for a minute. “No. I don’t even think she believes it. I wish I’d never loved him. I wish I’d never met him. Because I think that as good as the good times were, it isn’t worth feeling like this.”
We sat for a minute, side by side.
“What’s your name?”
“Candace Shapiro. Cannie.”
“What was his name?”
“Bruce. And you?”
“I’m Maxi Ryder.
“I know that. I meant, what was his name?”
She made a horrible face. “Oh, don’t tell me you don’t know! Everybody knows! Entertainment Weekly did a whole story. With a flow chart!”
“Well, I was very explicitly forbidden from even mentioning it.” Plus, there was more than one candidate, but it didn’t seem prudent to say so.
“Kevin,” she whispered. Which would be Kevin Britton, her costar from Trembling.
“Still Kevin?”
“Still Kevin, always Kevin,” she said sadly, fumbling for another cigarette. “Kevin who I can’t forget, even after I’ve tried everything. Drink… drugs… work… other men…”
Jeez. I suddenly felt very innocent.
“What do you do?”